On the effective density for compressible flow in porous media

Abstract

This paper addresses the following question: Is there any kind of effective density for the description of momentum transport of a compressible fluid in porous media? Pioneering 1956 Biot’s results and subsequent experimental and theoretical work suggest the convenience of introducing an effective density to describe important physical phenomena, such as wave propagation in a saturated fluid porous medium. In this work we use a volume averaging method to obtain effective medium equations to describe the macroscopic phenomena in porous media. Our results indicate that an effective density can be theoretically determined and its computation can be obtained from the solution of a closure problem.